GOAT Group: What It Does, Who Runs It, Funding and News

GOAT Group is the Los Angeles company behind GOAT, a marketplace for authentic sneakers, along with the Flight Club stores, the Grailed fashion resale site, the alias selling platform and the discount store Sneakers.com. Its Y Combinator profile lists it in the Winter 2011 batch, although GOAT itself launched in July 2015: the batch date belongs to the founders' earlier startup, Grubwithus. Its legal name is 1661, Inc., which appears in Foot Locker's 2019 SEC filing and the FTC's 2024 case.

This page covers GOAT Group's key facts, how it started, its brands, who leads it, its funding history and what has happened since the start of 2025.

GOAT Group key facts

From Grubwithus to GOAT

GOAT Group began as a different startup. Eddy Lu and Daishin Sugano met as students at UC Berkeley and built iPhone apps together, YC's page says, then started Grubwithus, a social dining app. According to First Round Review, Grubwithus was accepted to Y Combinator in 2011, raised a $1.6 million seed round that included First Round Capital, and raised a $5 million Series A in 2012. Index Ventures gives the Series A as $6 million, and says the founders, who ran Grubwithus from Chicago, later moved to Los Angeles.

Grubwithus proved hard to scale, and the founders shut it down, YC's page says. The idea for GOAT came from a fake pair of Air Jordans that Sugano bought on eBay; YC and Index Ventures date the purchase to 2014, while First Round Review says 2013. First Round Review reports that the founders had about $1 million of runway left and that Upfront Ventures partner Greg Bettinelli was the first investor to back the change of course. GOAT launched in July 2015 and took off after a Black Friday promotion that year, when users grew from tens to more than 100,000 in one week, according to the same account.

What GOAT Group does

GOAT Group sells sneakers, apparel and accessories through several brands. YC's profile lists four of them, and the March 2026 launch of Sneakers.com added a fifth (Footwear Magazine):

• GOAT, the original marketplace for authentic sneakers, which expanded into apparel and accessories in 2019 (World Footwear).
• Flight Club, a sneaker retailer that merged with GOAT in February 2018 and had two stores, in New York and Los Angeles, at the time (Index Ventures).
• Grailed, a resale site for men's luxury, streetwear and vintage fashion, acquired in October 2022 (World Footwear).
• alias, a resale platform for sellers; in September 2025 Complex described it as GOAT's subsidiary resale platform and reported that alias listings would be returned to sellers; the sources here don't say whether alias still operates (Complex).
• Sneakers.com, a store for brand-new sneakers at lower prices, with an average order of about $70 (Hypebeast).

The company's reported audience has grown with each milestone: 7 million combined members at the Flight Club merger in 2018 (Index Ventures), more than 30 million customers in 2021 (Reuters), roughly 50 million members after the Grailed deal in 2022 (World Footwear) and more than 60 million members in 2026 (Footwear Magazine). In June 2021 it reported some $2 billion in gross merchandise volume (TechCrunch).

Who runs GOAT Group

Eddy Lu is co-founder and CEO, a title he has held in GOAT announcements from the 2018 merger (Index Ventures) to the Sneakers.com launch in 2026 (Footwear Magazine). Daishin Sugano, the other co-founder, is listed on YC's page as founder and CPO (chief product officer). Sen Sugano, Daishin's younger brother, who joined Grubwithus in Chicago, is chief brand officer (Index Ventures, 2022; Hypebeast, March 2026).

Three directors were named publicly when they joined: Danny Rimer of Index Ventures and Damany Weir of Flight Club in February 2018 (Index Ventures), and Scott Martin, Foot Locker's senior vice president of strategy and store development, in February 2019 (Retail Dive).

GOAT Group funding history

Since the pivot to GOAT, the company's disclosed rounds run from $25 million in 2017 to a $195 million Series F in June 2021, the most recent round in the sources cited here. Its investors listed on YC include Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Matrix Partners, NEA, SV Angel, Upfront Ventures, Webb Investment Network and Y Combinator.

Reports differ on two details. Reuters names Park West Asset Management as the Series F lead, while TechCrunch says the round was led by a group of hedge funds and private equity firms including Park West and Franklin Templeton. And the Series E valuation was $1.75 billion in Global Venturing's 2020 report but $1.8 billion in TechCrunch's and Reuters' 2021 coverage.

GOAT Group recent news

• 2025: Under its settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, GOAT paid more than $736,000 in refunds directly to affected customers (FTC). The case dates from December 2, 2024, when the FTC alleged that GOAT shipped 37% of "Instant" orders later than promised and did not set up a system to honor its Buyer Protection policy; the order required $2,013,527 in refunds (FTC).
• September 25, 2025: Complex reported that GOAT was ceasing operations at facilities in Hong Kong, Japan and the UK, and that alias listings would be returned to sellers in early October; GOAT did not respond to Complex's request for comment (Complex).
• March 31, 2026: GOAT Group officially launched Sneakers.com after a soft launch in 2025, carrying brands such as Adidas, Hoka, On, Nike, Puma, Reebok and New Balance (Hypebeast, Footwear Magazine).
• October 6, 2026: The FTC began sending more than $100,000 in further payments to 6,205 customers who had not yet received a refund (FTC). The FTC's releases don't account for the rest of the $2,013,527 the order required.